When planning a vacation or business trip, travelers have a wide array of sources through which they can make lodging arrangements. These sources include the actual lodging establishments themselves as well as a number of third parties through which reservations may be made. These third parties include travel reservation companies that provide World Wide Web (“Web”) sites or telephone call centers through which customers can reserve hotel rooms. These Web sites and call centers are abundant and competition to attract customers pressures these third parties to provide low lodging prices. This competition is heightened by the ease of comparison shopping between travel reservation companies on the Web. However, although lodging establishments may wish to provide their rooms for resale by these third parties at discount prices (to ensure that the maximum number of rooms are occupied at any given time), the lodging establishments do not want to undercut their regular room prices by flooding the market with discounted prices. For example, many customers may be willing to pay the regular price for a hotel room, but instead may find and make a reservation at a discounted price offered by a reservation company. Therefore, many hotels and other lodging establishments do not sell their rooms or sell a limited number of rooms through these third parties at discounted prices.
One company that has attempted to address this problem is Priceline.com. Priceline.com uses a “reverse auction” technique where customers select a location, date and price for which they would like a hotel room, and Priceline.com then provides this bid to hotels. If a hotel accepts the bid, the customer is typically required to stay at the accepting hotel. However, a customer knows very little about the hotel before being bound by a bid that the customer has made. For example, the customer may only be able to specify a minimum rating on a rating scale that the accepting hotel must have and a general location at which the hotel is located, such as in a downtown area. Therefore, many customers are reluctant to use this service and hotels are restricted in their ability to sell their excess rooms at a discounted price.